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This week I had a very nice email from a gentleman who is kind enough (much like you, dear reader) to glance over my blog now and then. This student was embarking on a music psychology project at his college and he wanted to ask me a simple question to help him develop his project ideas: Why do different people like different types of music?

Jackpot!

Well, after reading the question I sat at my computer for a minute or two spouting off ideas like a slot machine fires out coins when you hit the jackpot. Where to begin?! So may things influence how people come to form musical preferences; passive exposure during childhood, the influence of culture, the development of self concept in the formative years, the influence of memories, emotional style, listening habits….and so on!

I tried to be helpful and pointed my young enquirer in the direction of some literature on musical preferences. My advice then was for him to pick one or maybe two of the influences, whatever he was intrigued by the most, and to investigate hypotheses directly from within his chosen dimensions. He thanked me for my reply and that was that.

Then, low and behold, the very next day I can across and article on one of the dimensions which I have not yet mentioned; personality. So in honour of that young man, here is a summary of a recent article entitled ‘Toward a better understanding of the relation between music preference, listening behaviour, and personality’

The article was written by a group from the Philips Research Lab in the Netherlands and they had a rather intriguing method for their study. They wanted to better understand how reported musical preferences related to actual listening behaviour, as attitudes are not always consistent with behaviour in this world. They tracked what people listened to and how long they listened while they were at work (at Royal Philips Electronics) from a database of 70,000 audio recordings over three months. Remember my blog last week about music listening habits at work? This is a simpler form of recording listening habits, but much more extensive – a rare source of rich data!

The recordings from their database were grouped using the ‘All Music Guide’ (2008) into 16 music genres. They measured the music preferences of 395 people (using the STOMP – Short Test of Musical Preference) of which 267 people provided enough listening behaviour data for further analysis.

The authors originally intended to try to support the findings of Rentflow and Gosling (2003) who had set out four types of musical preference;

Reflective and complex

Intense and rebellious

Upbeat and conventional

Energetic and rhythmic

However, try as they might (and they tried a LOT of factor analyses!) the present authors could not replicate their framework. Their data pointed to a 6 factor preference model instead:

Rhythm and Blues

Hard Rock

Bass Heavy

Country

Soft Rock

Classical

It is interesting that they chose to stick more closely to genre type labels instead of the more esoteric concepts employed by Rentflow and Gosling (2003). And I wonder how well these models hold up against different cultures, as well as across different periods of time. The authors acknowledge in their paper that a lot of the music listening reflected the current state of industry music sales in the US and UK.

When they looked at musical preference according to the STOMP and listening behaviour they found strong correlations, meaning that the individuals were reliably listening to the types of genre that they reported liking on their questionnaire (measured using listening duration).

This seems a straight forward finding, but I wonder how it would change if you asked people of a younger age group, perhaps one that was less gender biased (the majority of participants in the present study were male), and how it would vary if people had to fill out the STOMP in group situations. That would be a good way to get at social influences on reporting of musical preference.

And what about personality? They found a number of correlations between personality traits (as measured by the Big 5) and musical preference which replicated previous work. These included positive correlations between extraversion and pop, dance, rock and religious music, and a positive correlation with agreeableness and soundtracks. But the only consistent correlations that were found after they considered both reported preferences and listening behaviours were between neuroticism and classical music, and openness to experience and jazz.

The authors make an additional point throughout the paper which I think is very worthy of future consideration. They argue that studies in this field are hampered by the use of genre labels. Genre’s, they argue, are evolving, overlapping, ambiguous, and vary across individuals as to how they are defined; these are all potential reasons why their data did not replicate those of Rentflow and Gosling (2003).

After less than 10 years the groupings of musical genre seemed to have changed quite a lot between the two studies. In the present study rap and dance genres grouped together in the analysis, whereas in 2003 they were easily separable. Also, blues and jazz were distinct from classical music in the present study whereas in 2003, apparently, they grouped together! So the use of genre labels may be too unstable a notion upon which to measure musical preference. What might we use instead? The authors suggest trying to relate personality to specific, objective audio characteristics rather than genre. An intriguing idea…

Conclusions

This study has shown that musical preferences can match closely with listening behaviours in an occupational environment (although, as I said, I would love to see this tried out in different populations and situations) and that there are relatively few reliable correlations between personality and musical preference/listening. However, the problem of using genre labels must be considered before drawing conclusions on the latter point. Overall, this is a very interesting study and certainly an eye-opener when it comes to ways in which you can potentially measure listening behaviour when you have access to music industry level technology.

4 thoughts on “Personality and music preference”

I enjoyed reading your post! It gave me cause to look through the Dunn, de Ruyter, & Don Bouwhuis study for myself. Interesting stuff. The correlations they found (neuroticism and classical, openness and jazz) certainly make sense in light of past personality/music research, and in terms of face validity.

I think any exploration of musical preferences needs to consider sociological factors as well. Given the importance of peer relationships in adolescent identity formation, and how musical preferences developed as a young person tend to last a lifetime (I’m still listening to 80s rock!), I suspect that people largely to listen to the same music that other people like them listen to. The Schäfer and Sedlmeier 2009 Psychology of Music study talks about this some. But honestly, I haven’t followed the research in this specific area to know if people have been coming at it from this perspective at all. Sadly, when I cover this with music students at my university, I still refer to a chapter called “Who do you love? The dimensions of musical taste” (written by George Lewis), which is now over 20 years old.

Anyway, thanks for an interesting post. I’m glad I joined the Twitter worlds and was directed to your blog!

Hi Vicky (and Bob Woody from a previous comment, if he has a chance to see this), I thought you may be interested in this.

I’ve just performed a similar (much, much smaller) study (N = 99), and also found a six-component model (via PCA and SEM), with genres such as jazz classical loading onto seperate factors as with Dunn, de Ruyter, & Bouwhuis. It was not through lack of trying to squeeze the results into a four-factor structure however, I attempted numerous rotations and all suggested eigenvalue analyses etc. I did, however use the revised STOMP (STOMP-R, Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003, revised 2009).

I’m still interpeting and writing the analyses at this very moment for an undergraduate dissertation, but I’ve found the factors to be interpretable by sociological terms. The genres primarily loading onto each factor exhibit little in the way of musicological similarities (saving that of Rock, Heavy Metal, Alterntive, and Punk which remain grouped) yet seem to have similar prescedence in local culture to one-another (or intrinsic sub-cultural facets, as with Rock etc.).

Anyway, thanks for your blog! It makes for interesting and informative reading!